|
 |
"D-Seven. Report."
Something so simple as lifting one's own head feels like a monumental task, an unseen lead-filled fog pressing down on every muscle, dulling every sense.
It's completely dark. The gauze taped over the eyes are responsible for the loss of sight.
It's also cold. An empty chamber where sounds resonate from all directions, passing by the ears only to return again and again.
Sitting in the center is a lone figure, skin so pale as to almost appear blue beneath the single light overhead. Solid steel keeps her secured to a reinforced chair bolted to the concrete floor. Neither are going anywhere.
"D-Seven. Your -convoy.- Report."
She can hear it before it arrives. A low clunk of noise, a gentle brush of air. It's all the warning she receives before a strong shower of icy cold water rains down upon the inside of the room. Reeking of sewage. Of rotting flesh.
What she sees is all in her imagination though it still feels more like reality than dream. It isn't water raining down upon her but a cold black ichor that burns into her pores and leaves the ground sizzling and smoking from chemical burns. The acrid stench pierces her nose, coats her tongue. Assaults her remaining four senses.
Another voice speaks out, distant now as if spoken through a cold, snowy winter night. The words are pitched low and carry a thick German accent. "Subject is responding to treatment. Proceed."
The acidic sludge eats away at the room around her, dissolving the cement until cracks of a dark, hazy light can pierce through the darkness. Crimson red. Back from a place she never should have gone.
The chair is replaced with one constructed of rusting iron and bleached bone. Her bonds have transformed into thick loops of barbed wire, tearing into her with every twitch and gasp. She can feel the blood trickling out from the wounds, tickling like the crawling of insects dancing upon the ends of her nerves.
The black rain ceases, suddenly replaced with a deafening clunk. The sound plays on repeat through her mind, too quick to be another echo. It rapidly pulses in tune to a repetitive strobing of light which destroys her false vision, leaving her even more disoriented. As a sense of equilibrium returns the Hellscape in her mind is left blindingly bright, the blackened sludge-like rain already steaming as it gets cooked off of whatever surfaces the droplets yet cling to.
Then her mind explodes with shock and pain, an imagined iron pike heated until it glows being driven through her just beneath the ribs by a Hellish looking creature, its face distorted by a rictus grin.
She shouldn't be in this place…
There's a peculiar feeling of blisters rapidly forming upon her scorched skin, itching and burning until they start to burst open, revealing maggots which are colored with the same metallic gleam of jacketed bullets. As if afraid of the cold those revealed ones turn and begin burrowing into her, causing the skin around them to grow dry like sun-baked mud, splitting apart to reveal angry black lines like cracks forming in slow motion upon a porcelain doll.
The intense heat continues to grow, the ground and chair too hot to touch but impossible to escape. With it comes a growing sense of vertigo as the ground shifts into bubbling quicksand, reeking of antiseptic as it begins to consume her, chair and all.
Suffocation. Darkness envelopes her, heated liquid sand pressing all around with the intensity of a furnace, trying to claw its way into her with every strained breath. Then as if passing through a rift in space the pressure is gone. There's no longer any sense of direction, no diffrentiation between up and down. A swirling black vortex carrying her off into infinity with no other sound than a deafening buzz, like a power tool being pressed to her temples. Even this empty void cannot protect her from what feels like metal barbs hooking deep into her muscles. Twisting, turning, then hooking again.
It feels like a jarring impact even though she's still gone nowhere at all. The darkness is suddenly split by two bright yellow lights, soon followed by the deafening ignition of a car and a shrill revving of its engine. Something starts to glow orange behind the grill, the radiator becoming hotter and hotter until a flame flickers to life. The chromed mesh covering it melts into a series of jagged metal teeth, the growl of the engine becoming the growl of a massive, feral beast.
She never once heard herself screaming but suddenly she finds her throat raw, her lungs burning and starved of air.
The headlights disappear, leaving two after-images burned into her eyes which lazily float off into the ether like will-o-wisps. Once more there's nothing at all. A full-on fade to black. No outside stimulus. Nothing to trigger another hallucination. It isn't the first time that the faithless woman has prayed for an end.
Light gradually fades back in. She's back in the cold cement room, no longer alone. There's a shadowy figure standing ten feet in front of her, the light now coming from behind him so that she can only see the outline. The labcoat is easily recognized. As is the German accent.
"You have been a very bad girl, D-Seven… You have killed those men, have you not? Do not think this will go unpunished."
One of his hands slowly reaches up to his ear, taking hold of his own skin then peeling his face away. Where muscle and bone should have been there's nothing but thousands of tiny black orbs. The eyes of scorpions, staring intently at her. Suddenly they begin rushing forward to crawl down the man's still form. When they reach the floor there's an acute ticking sound, their feet terminating in steel needles which chip at the concrete as they scurry toward her. Hundreds of them, a mad rush of clicking hypodermic limbs, poison glinting off the ends of stingers which had been grafted onto medical syringes…
Pale blue eyes snap wide open.
Domino awakens with a stifled gasp, covered in cold sweat. The ticking sound comes not from a mass of augmented scorpions but the fall of a cold mid-October rain against the window of a Harlem clinic.
The sharp pain in her side comes not from an iron spear but from the mending of the wound she had treated here some hours before.
There is no acidic shower, only tears stinging at her eyes.
The fentanyl. Synthetic. Narcotic. It had made the Doctor'sthe real Doctor'slife easier while tending to the awful wound. Had Domino known what the injection would have meant for her…
Despite being all alone in the room that German-accented voice lingers within the shadows of her mind, echoing out from the deepest of corners:
'There may be some side effects…'